Features

Cincinatti Symphony “I always sang, since I was a child,” says Isabel Leonard. “I ended up fully entrenched in classical music, really, once I began at Juilliard. Before college I had been singing musical theater and with the jazz band as well…. I love it all!” Hailed as “opera’s most in-demand singer” by Town and Country, […]

Playbill Isabel Leonard will make her role debut in the title part of Carmen at Houston Grand Opera, kicking off its 2020–2021 season. The slate of offerings also includes a world premiere, Breaking the Waves, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. The revival of the Rob Ashford’s 2014 production of Carmen is set for October 23–November 13, conducted by […]

The Berkshire Eagle Isabel Leonard had just finished singing Sesto in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” in Paris and was taking a few days off with her 8-month-old son Teo when her manager’s office contacted her and asked whether she was on a plane back to the U.S. “I’m like, no, I’m actually in Vienna,” she said. […]

Town and Country It’s a wonder Isabel Leonard is able to talk at all. After all, the Grammy Award-winning singer is one of opera’s most in-demand voices, and this year alone she’s had leading roles in the Metropolitan Opera’s productions of Marnie and Pelléas et Mélisande and sang alongside Andrea Bocelli in his Three Centuries of Love. Next, she’ll appear in the […]

Isabel Leonard is one of, if not the, most in-demand opera singer in the world today. For the last decade her star has been on the rise all around the world both on the opera and concert stages. This season at The Met alone she’s performing in three different production, singing three roles that could […]

Imagista Imagista: You obviously have a remarkable, even enviable, talent as a singer and performer. At what age did you know you possessed this talent and at what age did you decided to pursue a career as an Opera singer? Isabel Leonard: Well, thank you! That’s very kind. I think I knew from a young […]

Vogue It’s a busy season for Isabel Leonard: The Grammy-winning opera singer just finished a string of five performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Metropolitan Opera; her upcoming dates with Andrea Bocelli at the Met (February 10 and 17) are already sold out; and she appears tonight on PBS (9:00 p.m. EST) singing the title role in Marnie—the Nico […]

A picture may paint a thousand words, but nothing compares to the intimacy and immediacy of a handwritten letter. Hearing the “Letter Aria” from Jules Massenet’s Werther will prove it. From an opera based on the Goethe novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, this scene finds the tortured heroine Charlotte re-reading the letters of the doomed poet. In […]

When Washington National Opera presents one of opera’s top examples of musical comedy next spring, it’s only fitting that the production will star a singer whose background sounds as ready-made for Broadway as for the opera house. Isabel Leonard, who will sing the lead role of Rosina in Gioachino Rossini’s laugh-filled romp The Barber of Seville, […]

That old guitar that you strum from time to time — did you know it has a soul? If musical instruments are said to have souls, then there is no instrument with a soul more Spanish than the guitar. And now, there is arguably no recording with a more Spanish soul than Alma Española, a new […]

Leonard Bernstein would have turned 100 next year. He and SF Symphony musical director Michael Tilson-Thomas were buddies. Lenny considered MTT his musical son. Not coincidentally, the Symphony will present a slew of Bernstein-themed programs throughout the season. Indeed the opener of Opening night was Candide‘s overture. It keeps going this week with the West Side Story symphonic dances, the Chichester Psalms, […]

Local audiences have heard Isabel Leonard at San Francisco Opera in one of her most acclaimed roles, Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and at the Symphony showing off her musical-theater chops in On the Town. Soon they will have a chance to enjoy the celebrated mezzo-soprano’s talent and charm at the Symphony’s celebration of Bernstein’s 100th birthday on […]

Isabel Leonard will be performing at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s closing night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The performance will be Saturday, Aug. 19 at 8 p.m. 1 Who are you? My name is Isabel Leonard. I am an international opera singing, love of dancing and cooking, full-time mom. 2 What activities or site-seeing do […]

“Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and baritone Jared Bybee headlined the first concert of this season’s George London Foundation Recital Series at the Morgan Library’s Gilder Lehrman Hall. The October 9 program found Leonard in exceptionally fine voice. She evinced supreme control over her chocolatey mezzo-soprano and instinctively tailored her approach to the long, narrow hall, so that […]